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Friday, July 29, 2016

Shadows of an Empress by Carole Waterhouse Excerpt & Giveaway

About the Book:

Title:
Shadows of an Empress

Author: Carole Waterhouse

Publisher: Anaphora Literary Press

Pages: 310

Genre: Literary Fiction

After the death of her mother, Sylvia is sent to live with
her grandmother on an isolated piece of farmland, where she and a nymph-like
companion run through the woods creating an imaginary world where her mother is
still alive. When Sylvia marries Dan, everyone sees her life moving from tragic
to fairy tale.But when a recurring
dream about a city she can’t identify leaves Sylvia feeling especially unsettled,
she goes into her living room on a sleepless night and finds the Empress
Elisabeth of Austria
waiting for her.

Suspecting their lives are somehow linked, the empress helps
Sylvia sort through her past and question her present.She and Sissi, Elisabeth’s younger version,
embark on a whirlwind tour of places related to the empress’s past where the Archduchess
Sophie tries to arrange a courtship between Sylvia and Franz Joseph, a
heart-broken Heinrich Heine laments the empress’s tendency to credit him as the
inspiration for her awful poetry, and Sigmund Freud offers commentary on their
journey.As they travel, Sylvia becomes more aware of
the empress’s faults. As their paths begin to separate, Sylvia learns from
Elisabeth’s mistakes and comes to realize that the answers she has been
searching for need to come from within. In a mock ceremony in Vienna,
Sylvia is crowned the empress of herself and returns home to start a new life
with Dan. She understands then that the city she has been haunted by all this
time is the life the two of them built, the one they are finally ready to enter
together.

Sylvia turned up the radios in all three rooms—the kitchen, the
bedroom, the workshop—the different locations making it sound as though there
were three people talking, one an echo of the other.Still, it was his voice surrounding her
completely, a sound that always gave her comfort.Dan, Dan, the music man.Her husband never realized the most intimate
words he ever spoke to her had nothing to do with love.

The radios were turned up so high, she wondered
how far his voice actually carried, for miles maybe, certainly as far as Zoe’s
house.She came down once, laughing,
turning them off, one after the other, diminishing the last to a faint
whisper.“Why do you make him shout
so?”

When Sylvia told her the reason, that she loved
surrounding herself with the sound of his voice, wanted not to just listen but
to be able to feel it in her bones, Zoe stopped and looked at her.“Don’t tell me after all these years you’re
still in love.”

Sylvia could hear the envy in her voice.She suspected that Zoe, too, listened to
Dan’s voice, knew what it was like to have it pulsate through her veins.

Dan, Dan
the Music Man.

They had laughed at the name he was given, the
repetition meant to sound lyrical, like one of the tunes circling in his
head.Neither of them had ever expected
that a radio show about music boxes would become nationally syndicated, even in
a niche area like NPR.He was a celebrity
in some circles, even if most people had no idea who he was.Zoe called him the most famous man no one had
ever heard of, and, given the way Dan laughed when she said it, Sylvia wished
it had been her comment instead.

“Music boxes can change lives.There’s no doubt.I’ve witnessed it many times.”

It was the voice she listened to more than the
words, although she sometimes felt his comments were a secret code meant only
for her.At the moment he was describing
one of their own antiques, a real treasure they had acquired just a few weeks
ago, the one Dan called the music box of his dreams.

It was actually a large automaton with rows of
horses that would race across the front as the music played, the device
designed so that the winning horse was randomly selected. She knew why he
prized it, that it wasn’t just the box itself, as exquisite as it was, but the
way it represented their lives together, fitting in perfectly with the
Victorian farmhouse, the real horses she loved so, a true home where husband
and friend were never far away.

About the Author

A professor of creative writing at California University of
Pennsylvania, Carole Waterhouse has an MFA in fiction writing from the University
of Pittsburgh and a Ph.D. in 20th
Century Literature from Ohio University.She’s the author of three novels, Shadows of an Empress, The Tapestry Baby, and Without Wings, as well as a short story
collection, The Paradise Ranch.Her short stories have appeared in an
anthology, Horse Crazy: Horses and the
Women who Love Them, and numerous literary magazines, including The Massachusetts Review, The Artful Dodge,
The Ball State University Forum, Crack the Spine, Blue Lake Review, Ceilidh,
Eureka Literary Magazine, Crossconnect, Spout,The Styles, Turnrow, Half Tones to Jubilee, Potpourri,The Baybury Review, Arnazella, Parting
Gifts, Pointed Circle, Seems, The Rockhurst Review, Oracle,and
The Griffin. She has reviewed books
for The Pittsburgh Post Gazette, The Pittsburgh Press and The New York Times Book Review.